Producers Turn to Indiegogo to Finance Orson Welles’s Final Film

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Add a few more twists to the decades-long quest to release “The Other Side of the Wind,” the unfinished final film of Orson Welles.

In October, a team of producers pulled off a feat that had bedeviled various directors, movie companies and TV networks since Welles died in 1985: They secured the rights to 1,083 reels of “The Other Side of the Wind” footage stored in a warehouse outside Paris. Work began to raise millions of dollars to complete the film, with the possibility of screening it as early as Wednesday, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth.

But the footage still sits in France awaiting shipment to this seaside filmmaking enclave, where an editor — Affonso Gonçalves, known for art films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Winter’s Bone” — has been hired to assemble it. As for obtaining the necessary money, that strategy has changed, too. They are now turning to the public.

The producers behind the project, Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall and Jens Koethner Kaul, along with Peter Bogdanovich, one of the movie’s stars, on Thursday plan to unveil a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo. They are hoping to raise at least $2 million by June 14 to help pay for editing, music and other postproduction costs.

“I think it would amuse Orson to have the fans able to contribute to the completion of the film,” Mr. Bogdanovich said. “As you know, he didn’t like Hollywood very much.”

Beatrice Welles, the filmmaker’s daughter and sole heir, who had long blocked access to the footage, said the Indiegogo route “is so perfectly anti-establishment that it almost gives me goose bumps.” Her father, she said, “would have loved it.”

If all goes well — a big if, considering the film’s tortured back story (an entire book was recently published on its making) — the producers hope to have “The Other Side of the Wind” ready to watch by the end of the year.

“We still haven’t even seen everything that was shot,” said Mr. Marshall, who was a line producer on the film in the 1970s.

Raising $2 million is a relatively modest goal; last month, Broken Lizard, a comedy troupe hoping to make a sequel to the 2002 movie “Super Troopers,” raised that amount using Indiegogo in just over 24 hours. But publicly passing a tin cup carries risks. Will enough Welles fans come out of the woodwork? If interest is low, will that spook potential theatrical distributors?

Mr. Marshall, whose producing credits range from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to the coming “Jurassic World,” and Mr. Bogdanovich said they had never even heard of Indiegogo when the service approached Mr. Rymsza in November. But they realized that raising money through fans would both reflect Welles’s idiosyncrasies and solve a problem.

They had planned to secure funding by preselling distribution rights, a common tactic in the independent film business. To a degree, they did. Even with the Welles pedigree, however, raising the total amount needed was proving difficult — at least without surrendering a lot of control. (Financing it themselves would break the first rule of Hollywood financing: Spend somebody else’s money, not yours.)

“People want to help us, but they have a business decision to make,” Mr. Marshall said. “They would first like to see an edited sequence, and I think that is a fair request.”

“The Other Side of the Wind,” a skewering of avant-garde directors, was conceptualized by Welles as a type of collage. The film is a reconstruction of a party — using various types of footage supposedly shot by guests and the paparazzi — held at the home of Jake Hannaford, a nonconformist film director, just before he dies; scenes from Hannaford’s unfinished comeback film-within-a-film are interspersed.

“We have a lot of instruction from Orson — handwritten notes, for instance — but it is very complicated to explain the structure,” Mr. Bogdanovich said.

Welles did leave behind 45 minutes’ worth of edited material. But it is not altogether cohesive, the producers said. It is also in Croatia. Welles’s longtime companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar, who has a stormy history with Ms. Welles, lives on the Croatian coast and has long controlled access to it.

Ms. Kodar signed a contract in October allowing its use. “That footage will come to us the minute we can move forward,” Mr. Marshall said.

Why is the unedited footage still in France?

Mr. Rymsza said the partners initially planned to keep it there, scanning the negatives in Paris and sending digital versions to California for editing.

“About a month ago, we decided to change course,” Mr. Rymsza said. “It became clear that we didn’t have the proper resources in Paris to do it.” He added, “It grew tedious with the time difference and the language barrier.”

The reels are being packed for shipping, Mr. Rymsza said. A special paper has to be inserted between the negatives to prevent damage. The reels will also be split up and flown on different planes, a safety precaution. If all goes well, the materials should be in California by early summer.